“Executives from Tech Data, one of the world’s largest distributors of computer products, told attendees of Raymond James Technology & Supply Chain Conference that Apple products have become a significant portion of its business,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD. “Specifically, Tech Data execs said that 12 percent of their revenue is Apple related, with the bulk generated by sales of Mac and iPad.”

“Extrapolating form it, Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt figures Tech Data is selling about two million iPads into enterprise per year. And that’s just one distributor,” Paczkowski reports. “‘If we presume other distributors are having similar success, then enterprise distribution may account for 5-10 million iPads annually,’ McCourt writes. ‘We view [this] as impressive as this does not include BYOD iPads brought into the enterprise.'”

In the company I work for (100+ employees), the CEO, 80% of VPs, most managers and the most of the people in my team have iPhones. A lot of the sales people have iPads as well. We use iPads as a marketing tool for customers. The company offers blackberries but everyone has chosen to get their own iPhone.
Everyone still uses PCs however since the company has to buy those and uses Windows server. However the primary use is now email and we are gradually moving to database systems for workflow. The time may come where the need to run office may not be so critical.

The company I work for instituted a BYOD program. I took advantage of it and bought my own MacBook Pro whose cost was met by the company’s compensation guidelines.

I did my own migration of documents, contacts, e-mail, address list, appointments and other stuff I had on the Outlook system. Quite a number of people took advantage of this to switch to Macs but the majority, more than 70% chose to stay put with Windows. They felt more comfortable with Windows which is what they were trained on.

Companies with BYOD programs do not provide staff training on how to use Macs. I think Apple needs to step up on this and offer free training programs or company sponsored training programs that help cross the divide between the Windows and Mac worlds.

What I see going on is a REVOLUTION whereby employees are FORCING Apple gear into the Enterprise. “Intransigent IT doofuses” and tech-illiterate CIOs/CEOs be damned. How hilarious that the tech-illiterates then pose as all impressive, like they had anything to do with it. The future knows better.

While indeed Apple supports Open Directory, Active Directory, SMB, VPNs, and Exchange, etc ; 3rd party solutions are required to match Windows on remote policy enforcement, remote installation & updating. Enterprise IT has used this excuse for a long time why they prefer to babysit Windows infrastructure — with cheaper initial hardware pricing being the other major factor. Apple need not worry at all about the latter issues, as long as it has an enterprise-ready OS X Server.